The German Empire, 1867-1914, and the Unity Movement - Vol. 1

W HILE the King of Prussia had been making one new Germany
in Berlin, another was being made at Frankfort. As at the
beginning of the century and again in 1830, so now the cause
of national unity was intimately bound up with the endeavour
of the constitutional party to place the government of the
country upon a broader basis. It is an altogether inadequate
view that the only motive behind the democratic movements
which turned Germany upside-down in 1848 was to increase the
power of the people at the expense of the prerogatives of the
Sovereigns and their Governments. A genuine and strong desire for closer union existed at that time, and if it was allied
with demands for constitutional reform, and on the part of the
extreme democrats for a radical change in the form of government itself, these demands derived much of their force and
justification from the fact that it was the Sovereigns who, for
their own purposes, were keeping Germany disunited.

To the ardent reformers of those days, Liberalism and national unity were merely two aspects of the same question.
Without a representative parliament emanating from the free
choice of free peoples, and frankly expressing the principle of
popular sovereignty, unity had for them neither attraction nor
meaning. Herein lay a fundamental difference of principle
which hopelessly divided the Sovereigns from the great body of
the nation. Many of them were still openly hostile to all constitutional innovations, and chafed sorely under the new restrictions upon their power; such rulers were in no mind to see
themselves bound by the fresh restraints which might be expected from the creation of a central parliament.

From the belief, common to the popular parties, that unity
could be brought about only by the resolute will of the nation
itself, proceeded a movement which, though unsuccessful at the
time, exerted a powerful influence upon the later course of
political events and determined some of the main lines upon

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